The soda tax was a disaster for Philly. It will be for Harrisburg, too | Opinion

When Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney first proposed imposing a beverage tax on city families, local businesses warned it would be both economically devastating for Philadelphia's neighborhoods and a disastrous long-term funding source for ongoing programs such as expanded pre-K, community schools and the Rebuild program targeting aging city infrastructure.

Unfortunately for the citizens of Philadelphia, the business community and the city as a whole, those predictions have both come true.

The mayor's tax has already cost America's poorest big city nearly 1,200 jobs, according to a recent study. A recent report found that families have taken their shopping to the suburbs to evade the tax, emptying supermarkets and corner stores of shoppers who have been customers for generations.

As a second-generation owner of two Philadelphia ShopRite supermarkets - both located near the Bucks County border - I have seen how the beverage tax is hurting our city's working class neighborhoods and damaging the local economy.

The 1.5 cents-per-ounce levy has forced shoppers to pay significantly more for thousands of popular beverages - from iced teas to juices. Many of the working families who live in our neighborhood can't afford to pay these higher prices and are fleeing the city to buy these products elsewhere.

The supermarket business is an extremely competitive one with razor-thin margins, and these declines have hurt our more than 500 employees - the majority of whom are union members. To compensate for lost revenue, we cut nearly 50,000 employee hours. While we avoided layoffs, this equates to 36 fewer jobs.

The industry employs thousands of workers, providing family-sustaining careers in a city struggling with high unemployment and endemic poverty. The mayor continues to attack the global beverage companies, but local businesses and the Philadelphia families they employ are hurting.

We now know that this tax is a disastrous long-term funding source for the extremely important programs it was designed to fund.

After a year of missing his tax-collection targets, Mayor Kenney finally bowed to reality in his recent budget address. He admitted that the tax was not generating enough revenue to sustain the city's pre-K program or community schools initiative at the level he promised.

The mayor's latest budget proposal slashes 1,000 seats from the pre-K program and also reduces the number of community schools.

At the same time, the administration has acknowledged that the persistent beverage tax shortfalls will force the city to change its plans for the Rebuild initiative, a $500 million investment in aging parks, recreation centers and libraries.

These decisions represent a broken promise from the mayor to the children of Philadelphia, who were promised better educational opportunities.

Now that the mayor has finally acknowledged that this tax has failed to generate the revenue needed to support the programs he promised, the people of Philadelphia should be asking why the city is doubling down on a tax that is economically ruinous.

Our elected officials - including Mayor Kenney and members of City Council - ran on a platform of helping neighborhoods left behind by Center City's growth. Rather than being wedded to an unpopular policy, we need a mayor who is enough of a leader to admit he was wrong and roll back the beverage tax while prioritizing funding of these important programs in a fiscally sustainable way.

It's time for Philadelphia voters to demand that our elected officials keep their promises to our communities and to our families.

We need a mayor who can find enough money in a more than $4 billion budget to fund the city's priorities without taxing working families and local businesses.

We need economic policies that lift up local businesses and incentivize job creation, not ones that punish entrepreneurs and working families.

We need real leadership from City Hall, not voodoo budgeting that leaves our local businesses and the thousands they employ struggling.